​We are TN Parents and we need you to know what is going on with the pilot voucher bill proposed for Memphis, because plans are for the vouchers to expand and spread across the Volunteer State, and this WILL affect your schools.

Can "Ju-bilee-ve" Who's Gonna Benefit from the Memphis Voucher Pilot???originally published on 3/15/2017 at www.mommabears.org

Why are Vouchers only for Shelby County Schools?Wheelin' & dealin' in the state legislature has lead to a front-runner voucher bill. Last week, the Brooks/Kelsey Opportunity Scholarship Pilot Program (HB126/SB161) emerged from the pack. But was met with resistance when a group of Shelby County School parents, teachers, and board members on Spring Break showed up in Nashville for the Committee hearing. The bill was rolled to March 21.

This bill would pilot a voucher program for Shelby County School students. But, not a single State Representative from Shelby County would sign off on it. So, a BIG Memphis Thank-You goes out to Knoxville's Harry Brooks for sponsoring a bill that experiments with the education of Shelby County School students.

Always good to try things out first on other people's children.

But Knoxvillians shouldn't despair, sources indicate that the state legislature has plans to spread the voucher love across the state of Tennessee. Former Lt. Governor Ron Ramsey confirmed that he supported intentions to expand the program statewide when he recently spoke to a group of Shelby County Republicans in Bartlett.

Ramsey, who lives in Blountville, made the nearly 500 mile trip to Bartlett, a Memphis suburb, to promote the Shelby County voucher bill. Bragging that Tennessee public education produced the fastest improving schools in the nation under the Haslam administration going from 48th in the nation to 23rd, Ramsey said the reform process was almost complete. The missing component is a school choice program.

After his remarks, local Republicans peppered him with questions. But Ramsey had few answers. He told the audience that in his neck of the woods, there is only one private school, a small Christian school called Tri-State Christian Academy. He went on to say he had been criticized in the past for charter school expansion. His response to his constituent was to point out the lack of charter schools in upper east Tennessee.

But that response didn't fly in Bartlett.

It was quickly pointed out to Ramsey that Shelby County is home to a large number of private schools. Audience members repeatedly asked him about the impact vouchers would have on public education in the Memphis area. But Ramsey sidestepped most of the questions saying he was just the salesman and did not know the details of the bill. One audience member asked if voucher money paid to private schools would be lost if a student returned to public schools. After repeating, he did not know how the bill would work, Ramsey got a little testy and responded by saying his focus was on children, not institutions.

But that might not necessarily be true. Ramsey was quite interested in one instituition—the Catholic/Parochial school system in Memphis. He mentioned Catholic schools several times as a superior alternative to public schools in Memphis. This prompted Shelby County Commissioner, David Reaves, to ask if the true purpose of the Memphis voucher pilot is to subsidize the financially distraught Memphis Jubilee Schools?

Are Vouchers Earmarked for Catholic Jubilee Schools?​A 2014 article in Chalkbeat gives credence to Reaves' question which Ramsey left unanswered. "[Jubilee] schools are among the leading advocates for a new controversial form of school choice in Tennessee: vouchers, which would let low-income families zoned to low-performing schools use public funds to pay for private schools." Three years later, Chalkbeat confirms that Jubilee Schools are still lobbying for vouchers.

Founded in 2000, the Memphis Jubilee Schools have been in existence for over 15 years operating in schools previously closed by the Catholic Diocese. According to their website, Memphis Jubilee Schools serve 1,500 students in nine schools located mostly in inner city Memphis. "Families pay only what they can based on their income and no family is turned away due to finances. Furthermore, scholarships follow students to all Catholic middle and high schools in Memphis."

The Memphis Flyer reports that the Jubilee Schools were not readily accepted at first with some complaining that reopening the old inner city Catholic Schools was not pragmatic. "Sister Mary Della Quinn, dean of mission and religious studies at St. Agnes Academy, is one of many posing those questions to the Diocese. 'It doesn't matter if someone gave $30 million; it just costs so much to run a school even for a year.' Quinn, like others within the Catholic school system, suggests that the re-openings are acts of nostalgia and that the money should pay for upgrading existing schools, increasing teacher salaries, and providing technology for more classrooms."

The Jubilee Schools got their start with an anonymous $15M donation in 1999 and have continued operations funded primarily by donations. One of the big Miracle Partner donors is none other than the Hyde Family Foundation—a big name in education reform who has been pumping money into Common Core, Teacher Evaluation Models, Charter Schools and all those other icky reform measures. ​

Are Vouchers Really What's Best for Children?​The Memphis voucher pilot has received quite a bit of push-back in Shelby County. Republican Senator Mark Norris from Collierville called the bill problematic. School boards from surrounding suburban districts have taken a stance against the voucher program. And the Shelby County Commission recently passed a resolution opposing Kelsey's voucher bill in a 10-0 vote with Commissioner Heidi Shafer abstaining. Two years ago, she argued for vouchers, saying that parents should have an "escape hatch" for students "trapped" in failing schools. She also touted the benefits of competition among schools. "Competition makes everybody perform better," she said. "I think it does create a real hardship for the schools. But they are going to have to learn to compete the way the rest of us do."—Shelby County Commissioner Heidi Shafer But under the proposed pilot, not everybody in Shelby County would be subject to competition. As written, the bill provides that only students attending Shelby County Schools are eligible for vouchers. School choice would not be available to inner city Memphis students who attend failing charter schools in the State-run Achievement School District. Those students would remain "trapped" in their failing schools without an "escape hatch" while the ASD would be protected from voucher competition.​According to Peter Meyer's article on saving Catholic schools in America, competition from charter schools has contributed to the demise of inner city Catholic schools. The article quotes Father Ronald Nuzzi, director of the Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE) leadership program at Notre Dame, as saying, "charter schools are one of the biggest threats to Catholic schools in the inner city, hands down. How do you compete with an alternative that doesn’t cost anything?”

The article found that "vouchers are proving to be something of an antidote to the threat posed by charter schools." "In Milwaukee, for example, according to Paul Peterson, while charters have 'accelerated' the decline of private schools, vouchers seem to have 'stabilized' them." "The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel concluded in 2005 that 'the principal [sic] effect of choice' in the city has been 'to preserve the city’s private schools, many of them Lutheran and Catholic.' David Prothero, associate superintendent of schools for the archdiocese, says the 6,000 Catholic-school voucher students represent nearly half of Milwaukee’s Catholic school students. 'That’s significant.'”

Vouchers may be a boost to declining inner city Catholic schools but are they what's best for students? Without subjecting Catholic school students to the same assessments as their public student counterparts, we may never know the answer to that question. ​

More on Vouchers for Memphis Catholic Jubilee Schoolsoriginally published on 3/20/2017 at www.mommabears.org

We told you in our previous Momma Bear blog, all about how the Catholic Jubilee Schools seem to be the intended beneficiary of the Memphis pilot voucher bill. And how they stand to "gain more than $2 million from vouchers" at the expense of Shelby County Schools.

Well, we must have struck a nerve that sent the lobbyists for the Catholic Jubilee Schools into action. Yes, that's right, the Memphis Jubilee Schools have not one, but THREE lobbyists: Mark Cate, Daniel Culbreath, and Stephan Susano.

You may be asking since when do struggling Catholic schools hire lobbyists? And how can they afford lobbyists with so many needy kids?

Well….uh, maybe, when they have a lot to gain from influencing elected officials, it's worth finding the cash for lobbyist?

Enter the Stones River Group, a lobbying firm hired by the Catholic Memphis Urban Schools, Inc. Yeah, you're gonna want to hit those links to see what one political blogger has to say about Stones River and how they get paid with taxpayer dollars. And you are gonna want to see the MILLIONS of dollars reported by Catholic Memphis Urban Schools on their 990 tax returns.

According to the Tennessee Ethics Commission website (TEC). Heading up that effort is Mark Cate who formerly served as Gov. Bill Haslam’s chief of staff where he was his top advisor, strategist and negotiator. Also employed as a lobbyist for Stones River Group is the former Executive Director of Tennesseans for Student Success, Jeremy Harrell who served as Haslam's campaign manager in 2014. But Harrell is not listed as one of the CMUS lobbyists. But hey!! They are struggling Catholic schools and can't afford to hire all the lobbyists.

Oh you remember Tennesseans for Student Success, don't you? We understand there are so many of these out-of-state groups coming into Tennessee and they keep changing their durn names so it's hard to keep up. So, click this link for a refresher on Tennesseans for Student Success.

The Catholic Jubilee Schools have bought themselves quite a powerhouse of influence to get public school dollars for their schools. No doubt, they are going to need those fancy lobbyists. One Shelby County Commissioner has already declared he heard the Memphis voucher bill is on its deathbed. And if by some miracle, it passes, then he promises that the Shelby County Commission will challenge its legality.

Yes, sir. The powerhouse lobbyists can expect a fight on their hands to save the Memphis voucher bill. A group of parents from all over Shelby County including suburban municipalities are headed to Nashville in the morning for the 9:00am hearing on the bill. ​

Why take a child out of a "failing" public school and pay his way to a school that does not provide the same testing accountability?

MILLION DOLLAR QUESTION: If private schools don't go toe-to-toe with tax payer accountability, just like public schools; then, how will taxpayers ever know if vouchers are working? Or is that the point?

On Monday evening, you are scheduled to hear HB 1049/SB 999 (school vouchers) on the House Floor. The Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce opposes this legislation due to its lack of true accountability by not requiring participating private schools to administer state mandated assessments. This discrepancy will not provide a transparent, consistent analysis of the program for the taxpayers.

The Chamber has typically supported school choice options, but there has been true accountability. With charter schools, students are given the same state mandated assessments. With online virtual schools, students are given the same state mandated assessments. The choice of a voucher should include this requirements as well. Louisiana and Indiana require the administration of state exams in their voucher programs. While critics claim that such a requirement will deter schools and students from participating, last year 30,000 students participated in the program in Indiana.

Representative Charles Sargent has filed Amendment #10 to HB 1049 which would require participating schools to administer state assessments. This amendment as well as the bill itself will both be items on the Chamber's Annual Scorecard this year. The Chamber urges you to support this amendment [#10] which will ensure accountability for this new taxpayer funded program. Thank you for your service to this State, and please let me know if you have any questions.

Lee HarrellVice President, State Policy Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce

Say Yes to Amendment 10 to HB1049

If you believe schools who accept public voucher money should be held to the same accountability standard as public schools, contact your legislators and tell them to support Amendment 10 to HB1049. Shouldn't every school that accepts taxpayer dollars share in the TNReady fiasco experienced this morning by thousands of public school students across Tennessee?

Oh, and if someone gets the wise idea of limiting vouchers to Memphis or Nashville. They should read this article from 2012 where Federal District Court Judge Samuel "Hardy" Mays struck down the municipal schools law as being unconstitutional since it applied to only Shelby County.

Legislators, I have got to say I am really impressed by your willingness to stake your political reputation on the idea of vouchers for the sake of those poor, poor children. Some may say otherwise, but I take it as evidence that you care about all children. Seeing as, for the most part, you will never even interact with these children. People don’t appreciate how expensive running for office every two years is and out-of-state education lobby groups have been extremely generous over the last several years. Heck, last year alone they dropped 260K on your campaigns. A million bucks over the last two years is a lot of cabbage. Especially now that some of you are drawing challengers. Your willingness to make this sacrifice shows that this truly is about the kids.

You rural folks, who have done a lot of the heavy lifting on this bill, might be a little worried that you might not get to benefit from this voucher bill. Fear not, I know you are being told that this bill is primarily for those poor kids in Memphis, Nashville, Knoxville, and Chattanooga, but let’s look at that a little closer. A lot of people don’t realize that just a couple of students can have a profound effect on a school’s overall grade.

Look at Williamson County, arguably the home of the best schools in the state, and specifically at Fairview Middle School. A few transfer kids with special needs threw off their results enough for them to get classified as a “focus” school. So, if a couple of priority schools in Memphis get rid of 100 or so kids each with their vouchers, then they’ll no longer be in the bottom 5% of schools. But there will always be a bottom 5%. So be on the lookout – Fayette, Maury, Grundy, Hardeman, Hancock, Roane, Sevier, and other counties – any one of you could come off the bench and suddenly become eligible for vouchers.

Do you know what the best part is? Let’s say Swiss Elementary School students were eligible for vouchers, but the parents disagree with the rankings. They believe in their school, and they don’t want to use vouchers to enroll in a private school. Well, that would then mean that any student in Grundy County could now get their private school tuition paid for with taxpayer dollars. Sweet! If those poor kids don’t want it, then it’s yours! Pretty good deal, huh?

So lets inflate the balloons, strap on the party hats, and crank up the Kool and the Gang, because its time to celebrate. Unless, of course, some of those pesky parents, educators, county commissioners, school board members, African American State Representatives from Memphis, students, and community members who can’t appreciate all you do raise too loud of a fuss and stop this bill come Monday. But that will never happen…. or will it? The choice is ours.

Sincerely,

​A pesky parent

﻿If you are concerned and/or furious about our elected officials voting on Monday to abandon public schools in TN, click the button below to contact your legislator. They need to hear from constituents before Monday's House vote. There is still time to stop this from happening.

The public isn't fooled. They are following the money trail that leads right to the legislators who vote "Yes" for vouchers, and they do not like what they are finding.

For example, Representative Susan Lynn, who received thousands from pro-voucher, out-of-state organizations, wrote an opinion article for her local newspaper. But the public isn't buying it. People are speaking out, like this woman from Tennessee who commented on that article:

She has an excellent point: why aren't legislators FIXING those schools? Why aren't they fully funding them? This commenter knows that private schools are not the answer, that private schools will cherry-pick students, and are not the moral choice. Fix public schools for every child!

People are doing research, too, and realizing things like this about the pro-voucher supporters who testified in the House Committee last week:

And people are researching and uncovering where the money is coming from and who it is going to:

Tennessee Education Report says that nearly $1 million has been given to legislators from pro-voucher organizations since the 2012 election cycle. The biggest recipients have been House Speaker Beth Harwell ($43,000) and Senator Dolores Gresham ($28,500). The money has come from StudentsFirst, an organization headquarted in California, and American Federation for Children, a shady ALEC organization that seeks to privatize and profit from public schools and prisons.

​And people are watching votes closely. This lawyer in Shelby County was so upset about his legislator, Rep. McManus, voting for vouchers in the House Finance Committee, that he went the next morning and pulled a petition to run against Rep. McManus in the next election.

People have serious concerns about vouchers...

In every state that has implemented vouchers, the vouchers started small as a reason to "save poor children trapped in failing schools." But the vouchers expanded, serving upper class students, and further exacerbating the starving of public schools and denying poor students their right to an excellent education.

The bottom 5% of schools is ever-changing and endless. Logically, there's no way to get every school in the state out of that bracket! There will always be a bottom 5%. Furthermore, the smaller schools that serve high populations of foreign students are at a severe disadvantage against affluent districts.

Rural and suburban legislators who think their districts are safe, beware... all it takes is one school in the bottom 5% and your district will be ripe for voucher-picking. Once the poor kids from Memphis are "lifted out" with a voucher, all eyes will be on rural and suburban schools to take their place at the bottom of the rankings.

Public money funding private religious schools hard to discriminate against once the Pandora's Box has been opened. What if extremist religions such as Westboro Baptist Church(that garners media attention by protesting at the funerals of American soldiers and even at the funeral of a child of a politician) wants to open a private school? What about churches of Scientology? Satanic Houses of Worship? Schools of Witchcraft (not Hogwarts, of course)? Who gets to decide if they get public voucher money to educate children?

Vouchers have not increased educational outcomes in other states that have implemented them. Vouchers have been proven to have harmed students in Louisiana. The studies that pro-voucher supporters share with legislators are funded by those pro-voucher organizations and are not accurate.

Contact your legislator to tell him/her to vote against vouchers. It is too late in the TN Senate, but the TN House of Representatives votes on the voucher bill on Monday afternoon. So, HURRY!!!!

Knoxville School Board is working on the following Resolution against using TNReady Data for teacher evaluations. Other school board members across the state have heard through the grapevine about this Resolution and are bringing it before their local boards to adopt it, too. TN Parents are happy to continue passing this information along the grapevine with the hopes that it may bear fruit and light a fire under the pants of elected officials.

Parents & Teachers: Please send this to the school board members in your district and push them to adopt it.

School board members: Please consider adopting this powerful Resolution, as it will send a clear message to the Capitol that legislators must fix the problem they created by passing laws to mandate testing and forcing districts to use student test scores to evaluate teacher evaluations.

Legislators: Please revoke the awful law that forces districts to evaluate teachers using student test scores. It has created a toxic high-stakes test-driven environment that is not healthy for students and has driven quality educators out of our children's classrooms.

Click HERE for a printable pdf of the Resolution.Click HERE for the documentation to support the Resolution.

The following was a public Facebook post by Amy Frogge, elected School Board Member for Metro Nashville Schools. It explains a lot, including why charters are allowed to expand in TN despite dismal outcomes. Legislators, the TDOE, and school districts need to know this:

full text of her post:

Here’s how KIPP, a non-profit charter school, and its investors make money:

Last night at our board meeting, we discussed whether our district should oversee two new KIPP schools, which the appointed state Board of Education has forced upon on our district under the new state charter authorizer law. This was a test case for the new law that many believe is unconstitutional. The state authorizer law takes away local control of schools and requires our district to pay for the charter schools that they force us to open.

A few months ago, our school board denied the KIPP applications based primarily on fiscal impact and the lack of demand for more KIPP seats in Nashville. However, KIPP, showing zero respect for the decision of locally elected officials (all the while claiming it wants to "partner" with our district), appealed its applications to the state, which overturned us. Last night, we voted to allow the state to oversee the two KIPP schools which it has authorized.

During our meeting, I made the comment that the new state charter authorizer law was passed because there is a lot of money to be made off the backs of poor people. This irritated my board colleague, Elissa Kim (a Teach for America executive), who challenged me to explain how non-profit charter schools make money. I explained that there are many ways non-profit charters make money, including: (1) a 39% federal tax credit that allows investors to double their money in seven years; (2) all sorts of land deals, including using taxpayer money to fund land investments that profit the investor, not the taxpayers; (3) requiring students to purchase materials from board members at marked up prices or charging students high prices for lunches and other necessities; and (4) taking money from classrooms and driving it up to the top by, for example, hiring cheaper, inexperienced, uncertified teachers; by using computers instead of teachers for classroom instruction; or by using uncertified teachers for enrichment like art and music.

Ms. Kim continued to press me to cite examples of how KIPP makes money, specifically in Nashville, but our board chair cut off the discussion. Had we continued the discussion, I would have pointed out that all of the above examples apply to all charter schools, even those here in Nashville. However, to answer Ms. Kim’s questions, let's dig a little more deeply into this topic.

1. First of all, I am certain that local hedge funders and venture capitalists take advantage of the New Markets Tax Credit program, mentioned above. Investors in the KIPP charter chain would be fools not to seek the greatest possible return on their investment.

2. Second, with regard to KIPP's local finances, it's important to note that KIPP Nashville is a private corporation that is part of a national corporate chain of KIPP charter schools. The KIPP Foundation has amassed net assets of over $31 million, KIPP in New York has amassed about $18 million in net assets, and KIPP in Texas has amassed net assets over $22 million. Much of this money comes from grants from the federal government, some comes from charitable donations, and of course, KIPP is also funded by our tax dollars.

KIPP spends this money lavishly. Over a six-year period, the KIPP Foundation spent $16 million on travel- to such places as the Opryland Hotel, Disney Swan and Dolphin Hotel, Rio Suite Hotel and Casino, and Red Rock Casino (in Vegas). A local teacher who formerly worked at a KIPP school sent me this message: "During my one year at KIPP, I was stunned at the lavish spending sending everyone across the country to a summit in Las Vegas: hotels, convention spaces, food, drinks, entertainment, the whole deal, before the year even started! Then once the year started, no money for paper, no money for subs, and certainly no interest in any teachers staying long enough to see salary increases. It struck me as bizarre--I knew what flights to Vegas and hotels there cost--what could each teacher have done with that money for supplies???"

There are many ways (described in the article below in the comments) that KIPP leaders can also double or triple their income through the school network. For example, the co-founder of KIPP Foundation is simultaneously paid a six-figure salary for his work at the foundation, another six figure salary for consulting with KIPP Foundation (doing work that he ordered), and a third six figure salary for acting as superintendent of KIPP schools in NYC. His total annual salary is over $468,000. Not a bad income for serving “the poor,” as KIPP would have us believe.

On its most recent 990 form, KIPP Academy Nashville (the only local KIPP school for which I could locate 990 forms) lists $7.7 million in total assets and $5.3 million in net assets.

KIPP Nashville and KIPP Memphis each got a million dollars through federal Race to the Top grants. Also, KIPP Nashville received $2 million in 2012 from the Charter School Growth Fund to help with expansion. KIPP Memphis received $3 million in 2011 from the Charter School Growth Fund, which allowed it to expand to ten times its size. The Charter School Growth Fund is a Denver-based venture capital fund. (Venture capital funds exist to make money; a venture capital fund would not invest in a charter school without the expectation of a clear financial return on its investment.) As more charter schools open, less funding is available for traditional schools. This cripples traditional schools, creating more "failing" schools and more opportunities to expand charter schools, which can select their students in both obvious and subtle ways. This is the process of dismantling public education.

And then there's the special treatment that charter schools like KIPP receive. Back in 2010, former Nashville Mayor Karl Dean decided to set aside $10 million dollars of capital funding for *ONE* KIPP school. At that time, the district was suffering from the recession and sustained three years of no capital funds, placing us a billion dollars behind on capital needs. MNPS traditional schools were housed in buildings with holes in floors, exposed wiring, mold issues, and other major troubles, but KIPP received $10 million for just a few hundred students. (At that time, this particular school may have been serving less than one hundred students; I'm not certain.)

3. Third, Townes Duncan, a Belle Meade venture capitalist, is a founding member of KIPP Nashville’s board, and while he no longer serves on the board, he remains an active supporter of KIPP. Duncan owns a venture capital company called Solidus Company. Solidus has invested in a program called “LiveSchool,” which is now used by KIPP. This is how it works: Charter school board members can influence charter school purchases and programs and thus make a profit from the charter schools they manage.

4. KIPP, locally and nationally, is staffed almost exclusively by Teach for America teachers. These young, inexperienced teachers are paid low salaries while working extreme hours, often 60-90 hours per week. Most TFA teachers, who get school loans paid off by TFA and enter a lucrative network for future careers when they leave TFA, quit the teaching profession after only a couple of years of teaching. This helps keep charter school staffing costs down. With TFA to supply a new crop of inexpensive new college grads yearly, there is no need for KIPP to develop long-term employees (who cost more money) or manage their own recruiting. TFA and schools like KIPP develop a symbiotic relationship and cannot survive without one another. Why? TFA contracts are being cut nationwide (MNPS cut the ranks of TFA teachers in half this year for low performance), and they now need charter schools to hire their recruits. Charter schools need TFA because they tend to overwork and underpay their teachers, and most teachers who have been through traditional training and certification tracks are not interested in working for charter schools. They can make more money and accrue better benefits working for traditional school districts.

So there you have it.

I’m sure this is just scraping the surface. I don’t know all the details of how KIPP operates or how it cuts costs. I don’t know if our local KIPP schools are involved in land deals that make money for investors. But one thing is certain: We would not have a charter authorizer law that takes away local control of schools if there were not heaps of money to be made from charter schools.

Last year, over 40,000 children were missing from Memphis schools when the truancy rate climbed to 41%. But the reality of the matter is that no one really knows how many truancies there are in Memphis and Shelby County.

The multiple paths to achievement model was introduced in 2012 during the Memphis City and Shelby County school merger by The Boston Consulting Group. Since then, it has lead to numerous school closings, ASD takeovers, and a proliferation of charter schools in Shelby County. The school system has become so fractured that it has no idea how many kids have fallen through the cracks.

​Just three years ago, Memphis City Schools and Shelby County Schools had a combined population of nearly 150,000 students. But when the two districts merged in 2013-2014, enrollment in the new unified system fell to only 143,849 meaning almost 6,000 kids were lost in the merger. And nobody seems to know what happened to them.

Prior to the merger, any attempt to close a Memphis City school was met with strong resistance from the school board. But that all changed in 2010 when Memphis City Schools voted to revoke its charter effectively forcing a merger with Shelby County Schools. During litigation over the forced merger, the federal district judge ordered a new 23 member school board be formed. Its first order of business was to begin closing schools in Memphis.

The school closings came in rapid fire succession as the newly appointed interim superintendent, Dorsey Hopson recommended closing 15 schools in 2013. An astonishing increase considering only 12 schools had been closed during the preceding eight years.

Legacy Memphis City school board member Kenneth Whalum refused to vote in favor of the 2013 closing schools. Whalum chastised the board for spending money on everything else but helping the poorest children in Memphis keep their schools open. He warned the board that they will pay a high price for school closings when rival gang members were assigned to the same school.

​While the school board was busy closing down schools, the state run Achievement School District had its sights set on Memphis. ​Gobbling up neighborhood schools and spitting out charter school replacements.

This prompted Sara Lewis, another legacy Memphis City Schools board member, to criticize the ASD charter schools as being poor substitutes for the neighborhood schools being replaced by them. Lewis accused the mostly young, white charter school staff of lacking both knowledge and understanding of African American culture and history. "Someone should have taught them African-American culture 101," she said.

Hard feelings towards the ASD continued as parents found out that an ASD takeover can disenfranchise children from their neighborhood school. Last year, the charter school chain operator Aspire arbitrarily capped enrollment at Coleman Elementary leaving its students out in the cold. “Once we hit capacity, we notified parents who wanted to attend Coleman that we no longer had space available.” Children who attended Coleman and resided in the Coleman attendance zone were no longer allowed to register for their school. Instead, the kids were told that they would be bussed 45 minutes across town to another Aspire school where student test scores were considerably lower.

Truancy and Teen Violence​

During the past few years, Memphis has become a city full of kids who have lost the stability of their neighborhood schools. Now, there are over 40,000 truants. That's more than the entire population of Germantown, a nearby suburban city. Along with an increase in truancies, Memphis has been rocked by a rash of teen violence. After all, truancy is a stepping stone to delinquent and criminal activity.

Parents complained to Nashville Prep adminstration about their 12 year old tween children being forced to read this book aloud in class at Nashville Prep. The response? Nashville Prep said they had edited the profanity and removed the really bad parts out, so the parents are just overreacting.

NOTE: Those images above are actual pages from a student's notebook from Nashville Prep Charter School.

1). Nashville Prep used poor judgement in requiring students to read a book that was too mature and inappropriate for 12 year old children.2). Nashville Prep admitted to illegally photocopying, editing, and distributing a copyrighted book.

Who will be held accountable for this? Legislators need to realize that parents have NO voice with this charter school "choice". Charters are not the answer to chronically underfunded public schools.

Tennessee Parents haven't written much lately. We have enjoyed spending summertime with our children, knowing this time can't be replaced. Don't worry, we're still keeping tabs on education news in TN. With TCAP school and district scores recently released, we found this blog by Gary Rubeinstein to be incredibly enlightening and worth sharing:

Posted onJuly 31, 2015 by Gary RubensteinThree years ago, the Achievement School District (ASD) in Tennessee began their mission, summarized in the statement on their website under the heading ‘Building the Possible.’

“The Achievement School District was created to catapult the bottom 5% of schools in Tennessee straight to the top 25% in the state.”

The timetable for this goal is just five years from the time the school enters the ASD. As I wrote to current ASD superintendent, Chris Barbic, who I’ve known for over 20 years from back in the days when we were both TFA teachers in Houston at the same time, this is not a feasible goal. It isn’t that I don’t think schools or teachers are capable of improvement, I just think that there is a limit to what can be accomplished by only focusing on replacing teachers and giving schools over to charters.I don’t know if this was an intentional thing or not, but look at the ASD logo.

See that triangle thing? It is called a Penrose Triangle or sometimes a Penrose Tribar. It is an optical illusion since something like this cannot be built. According to Wikipedia, in the 1950’s Penrose, himself, described the object as “impossibility in its purest form.” In a very candid moment, Barbic admitted during a panel discussion that even if the goal was unattainable, it served a purpose because it created an energy around a lofty goal which attracted funders and talent to the district.I have been following the progress of the ASD since it started and have been doing a yearly summary, in addition to other posts throughout the year. The 2013 edition can be foundhere and the 2014 edition can be found here. I plan to continue this yearly update until the end of the fifth year in 2017.At the end of July 2015, Tennessee released the state test score data for all the schools and all the districts. Every year when the data is released, Tennessee and the ASD are ready with their own spin on the results.The website Chalkbeat Tennessee titled their article about the data release ‘At critical moment, state run Achievement School District posts big gains at its original schools.’ In the article they had this interesting bar graph supposedly supporting this claim.

So the first thing I noticed is that while math is ‘up’ by about 11% in the past three years, Reading is ‘down’ by about 4%. And reading had gone up a bit last year, but now its down again. The Science, I don’t know much about that test so I’m not going to focus on it. Not that I don’t think science matters, but I’ve never heard a ‘reformer’ talking about anything but math and reading so I’m not going to let science into mix here.Now reading in the whole state of Tennessee is down 1.5% over the past 3 years, it has actually dropped a little each year since it peaked in 2013. It is now at the level it was before all the Race To The Top reform happened there, amazingly. So the ‘big gains’ are the 6 points in math. But isn’t reading really really important? What good is a program that increases math scores at the expense of reading scores? It’s like a drug that gets you to lose weight but also causes Cancer. The other thing to notice is that these percentages, even the 27% after the ‘big gain’ is way below the state average of 55.6% this year. And the reading at 13.8% is way way below the state average of 48.4%.I decided to do a little fact checking on this. What I found surprised even me.As the ASD has been around for three years, there are three ‘cohorts’ of schools. There are the six original schools which have been in the district for all three years. Then they added eleven more schools the second year, and six more the third year.For my analysis, I am looking only at the six original ASD schools since I have three years of data for them so they are the most relevant. The six schools in the original cohort are Brick Church College Prep, Cornerstone Prep — Lester Campus, Corning Achievement Elementary School, Frayser Achievement Elementary School, Humes Preparatory Academy — Upper School, and Westside Achievement Middle School.Last summer I analyzed the scores from these six schools and determined that two had improved scores, two had about the same scores, and two had worse scores than before the takeover. It definitely seemed like mixed results to me. On their ‘growth’ metric the entire district actually got the lowest possible score, a 1 out of 5.Of the six schools, the one that was doing the best, as of last year, Brick Church, was somewhat different than the other four because they were ‘phase in’ schools meaning that instead of the charter operator taking over the entire school, current students and all, they just took the newest students entering the school. So these schools were grades 5-8 and the first year they just took the new incoming 5th graders and they would ‘grow’ the school one grade at a time until they eventually took over the whole school. As these two schools were outperforming the others, it seemed to show that the more disruption the better. Brick Church had such big gains during the 2013-2014 school year that Barbic declared that it was on target to make it into the top 25% one year ahead of schedule, after just four years!One year ago Barbic said in an interview that three of the first six schools were on track to make it into the top 25% in five years.Here’s a quote from that article:

The special statewide district is taking over the lowest-performing schools in the state with a goal of moving them into the top 25 percent in just five years. Now in year three, superintendent Chris Barbic says he’s encouraged.

“You know, when we first talked about this, this was a goal that folks thought was completely crazy. And I think we’re learning is that not only is it not crazy, but we’ve got three of our first six schools that are on track to do it.”

One of those three schools on the right trajectory is Brick Church Pike College Prep in Nashville, which is slowly being converted into a charter school run by LEAD Academy. Barbic says if Brick Church matches this year’s student growth in math and reading, it would leap into the top quartile a year early.

He made this prediction based on the assumption that Brick Church’s 17 point gain in math and 24 point gain in reading was not a statistical outlier but something that could be repeated for the next two years. Of course Brick Church was the first school I checked their 2014-2015 scores for and they had huge drops (negative gains they call them!) of around 14 points for math and 17 points for reading, taking them way off the trajectory Barbic had predicted.Looking over the ASD scores for reading and math I noticed that all six of the original schools had gone down in reading while half of them had gone down in math. The one bright spot in the original cohort was Frayser’s math scores going from 14.6% to 37.6%, a gain of 23 percentage points. But looking at Frayser’s reading scores they had gone down 1.3% to a minuscule 7.6% proficient, one of the lowest scores in the state. I don’t know how they got their math scores up so much while having nearly no students pass reading. Regardless, I’m not sure that Frayser should be throwing any sort of victory party.The question that nobody seems to be asking is the most obvious one: At what percentile are each of these six schools now that they have been part of the ASD for three years? Originally they were in the bottom 5% in order to be eligible for the ASD. The mission of the ASD is to get them up to the top 25% in 5 years (though Barbic recently said that it could actually be 6 or 7). We hear about how Frayser’s math scores went up by 23 points this year and that ASD itself ‘outgrew’ the rest of the state in math by increasing it by 6 points. We also hear that schools that have been in the ASD for two or three years got the highest possible ‘growth’ score this year, which is a 5. But they never answer the simple question: At what percentile are the original six schools at now?Of course there are different ways to assign a single numerical grade to a school in order to rank them and see what percentile each school is at. I devised the most simple metric possible and which I think the most data-driven ‘reformers’ would approve of. Just add together the percent proficient in math to the percent proficient in reading to get a score that has a minimum of 0 and a maximum of 200. If a school had 80% passing math and 70% passing reading, they have a total score of 150, for example. Yes, there’s a lot more to schools than just these two numbers, but I wanted to keep things simple and inline with the sorts of calculations that ‘reformers,’ themselves, like to use.By this metric the top performing ASD school from the first cohort was Coming with a score of 48.6 followed by Brick Church (47.9), Frayser (45.2), Westside (42.1), Cornerstone (37.6), and Hume (33.1). To check where these scores ranked compared to all the Tennessee schools, I calculated this metric for all 1358 schools that had 3-8 math and reading and sorted them from high to low.Here are the results:

As you can see, four of the original six schools are still in the bottom 5% while the other two have now ‘catapulted’ to the bottom 6%. Perhaps this is one reason that Chris Barbicrecently announced he is resigning at the end of the year.Throughout the country, there are states that are considering creating their own ASD based on the supposed success of this one and the Recovery School District in Louisiana, on which this one is based. Senate Democrats actually tried, and failed, to get an amendment into the reauthorization of the ESEA that would mandate that the bottom 5% of schools in each state become an ASD, essentially. I hope that my very simple calculations are compelling evidence that the ASD does not live up to the hype. Getting two out of six schools from the bottom 5% to the bottom 6% has not earned them the right to replicate around the country.If you want to crunch the numbers yourself to verify my results or to find some of your own, here is my excel file I adapted from the publicly released state data. And here is the raw data from the state.

Special thanks to Gary Rubeinstein for kindly allowing us to share this with our elected officials.

After turning in my booklets, AP says come here, I need you to sit with her while she finishes. Who, you say? Goes and gets little 3rd grader on the bed in the clinic because she had to leave her class to puke her guts out with fever and crying, puts us in a tiny closet-sized room, scoots a trash can over and says here in case you get sick again, tells her to finish up so she can go home. She wept all doubled over the whole time crying and snotting on everything. Poor baby.

- A public school teacher in Shelby County, TN 4/30/15

T came to my class after he had been kicked out of every other class in his grade. He told me that he used to love school in 3rd grade but then his teachers stopped doing history, his favorite subject, in favor of math and reading skills for TCAP. He told me he was acting out because "I'm a no-good piece of crud who can't pass TCAP". This is T now, who I have arranged to be my historian intern, doing independent research on primary sources on a segregation-era private park for African Americans that once occuppied the land where our school now stands. College and career ready DESPITE TCAP.

- from a teacher in Metro Nashville School District, 2015

When I think of the TCAP test I gave this week, it makes me angry all over again. I tested several ELL students, two of whom I either had to mime what to do or have another student translate directions for me. God bless them! Those two didn't have to do the reading/language arts portion, but they did have to do science and math and will have to do social studies online next week. I read aloud the science and math but not the ELA portion, because, you know, we want to make them feel totally inadequate (my opinion). If they can't read well enough to do ELA, what makes us think they can read enough to do math and science, even with a teacher reading aloud?

I had to report an irregularity because one boy, new to us from Myanmar, kept going to the next math section when he wasn't supposed to because he saw the other students checking over their work and thought he was supposed to keep working, too. At least that's what I think he must have thought.

Can you imagine sitting down to take a test on what you know, but the test is written in Russian? Then being told you scored very low and must work hard to catch up? You're not stupid, but you're not Russian, either.

My other ELL students in the room worked very hard, but they also had problems that I, of course, could do nothing about. I'll give you an example. One boy, from Kurdistan, called me over during the ELA portion and asked if there was a mistake on his test. I looked at it. The word was 's'mores.' What the heck? I'm pretty sure they don't have s'mores in Kurdistan. Plus, since he's been here, we've been telling him that we put apostrophe 's' AFTER a word. Of course he was confused. And I couldn't help him other than to say it wasn't a mistake. I'm still furious about it. This was the ELSA test, *designed* for ELL students. How out of touch are we?

Sorry for the rant. It just really works my last nerve that we, as teachers, work so hard all year to help our students, and then they are misled and made to feel inadequate after making so much real life progress simply because one test is unfair and unrealistic. It is wrong and it needs to be fixed.

When you consider our standardized test scores, it's important to remember that Nashville- with a thriving immigrant and refugee population- serves the largest percentage of English Language Learners in the state. What are we doing to these poor children?- a teacher in Metro Nashville, 2015

If you haven't seen this, you should:

American students face a ridiculous amount of testing. John Oliver explains how standardized tests impact school funding, the achievement gap, how often kids are expected to throw up.

High-stakes tests have created high-stakes classrooms in Tennessee. Evaluating teachers using the high-stakes standardized testing of human children is a wrong that needs to be stopped. Please, speak up and stop this madness!

Authors: real parents & real teachers from TN

They are afraid to speak up and risk their jobs... They want to protect their children... This blog is for them: Their voices need to be heard.

These blogs are emailed to these TN officials: the TN Board of Education, the TN Commissioner of Education,the 99 TN House Representatives,the 33 TN Senators,the Governor of TN,every Superintendent in TN,hundreds of locally elected school board members across TN,and parents... lots and lots of parents.